College Parents Can Only Watch as Dorm-Room Door Slams

That’s what parents of high school seniors are saying to
themselves this spring as they send in the new-car-level deposit
for their darling’s college dorm room and tuition.

They’re thinking of the recent hate-crime conviction of a
student at Rutgers University who secretly taped his roommate
having sex with another man in their room and shared the video.
The roommate subsequently committed suicide.

Most parents quickly tell themselves to move on. After all,
there is little chance their child’s roommate will be so heinous
as to record someone else’s private life; there’s little chance
their child would tape someone else; there’s little chance their
child would commit suicide.

Still, parents hesitate. That’s because it is quite
possible for their child to land with a roommate whose
activities -- sexual, social or addictive -- are hard to take.
For every federal hate-crime case like the Rutgers one, there
are hundreds of rotten rooming situations that drive kids to
drop out, transfer or simply endure a memorably painful year,
with or without sorting out what is happening to them. And
there’s precious little anyone -- parent, child, school -- can
do about it.

A Novel View

The best way to explain the American dorm problem is
through two novels that many college freshmen and their parents
have already read: “Goodbye, Columbus” and “Lord of the Flies.”

The first, by Philip Roth, was published in 1959 and treats
romance, sex and religion; it even, passingly, involves Rutgers.
“Lord of the Flies,” by William Golding, came out a few years
earlier. It is the story of what school children do when left
alone on a deserted island and shows how freedom can quickly
deteriorate into bullying, and worse.

Let’s start with the Roth book. “Goodbye, Columbus” is set
in New Jersey a half-century ago. In the 1950s, male college
students served in the military but couldn’t vote, and colleges
imposed parietal rules, which kept young men out of women’s
dorms. Spring was still spring then, too, and there was plenty
of romance on campuses. The protagonist, Neil Klugman, a
librarian and graduate of the Newark Colleges of Rutgers, courts
Brenda Patimkin, a wealthy girl from Short Hills and a student
at Radcliffe College, Harvard’s sister school.

Toward the end of the book, Neil is summoned to Boston by
Brenda during Rosh Hashanah weekend. There is no question of
meeting in her Radcliffe room. The dorm mother will call home in
Short Hills to tell mom. “I’ve got a hotel room,” Brenda
breathlessly tells Neil.

Repression is the villain of “Goodbye, Columbus”: sexual,
religious and social. Roth didn’t plan it, but the novella
turned out to be a weapon in an anti-repression revolution that
swept away the fussy parietal rules, as well as decanal
authority and, in fact, Radcliffe College itself. The anti-repression movement eventually yielded the vote for 18-year-olds, the end of the draft and a violent reinterpretation of old
laws in favor of a new emphasis on the enforcement of civil and
human rights.

Most of those who advocated these changes never anticipated
their downside. Intimidated by courts and students who preferred
colleges advertising freedom, deans and dorm mothers abdicated
their authority or disappeared. When students became voting
adults, privacy laws shut out parents as well. No one controls
what happens in dorms, and those freshmen, who often don’t pick
their roommates, become especially vulnerable.

Hate Crimes

Our national emphasis on defining wrongdoing through the
legal code -- hate crimes -- implies that everything that isn’t
illegal is tenable in a college community. A student who tapes a
homosexual act is guilty of a hate crime, but one who tapes
heterosexual sex is only likely to be subject to slow-moving
dorm discipline, if that. All victims of video-bullying are
equally harmed.

The “tragedy of the commons” is an old economic concept. It
holds that people will abuse a public resource until that
resource is exhausted. But we also have a “tragedy of the common
room” at colleges, where nobody owns the dorm desk or bed, and
everybody abuses it. The result isn’t “Goodbye, Columbus.” It is
the anything-goes of bullies on the rampage: “Lord of the
Flies.”

The challenge for parents is to take dorm anarchy
seriously. They need to consider how to help schools reclaim
dorms, so that students there not only don’t tape, but also
protect and respect one another. There’s got to be a way to do
that so it also honors everyone’s rights. Civil rights alone
don’t constitute a community.

There’s something creepy about the current situation, in
which adults cross their fingers and look away from what
transpires at colleges because civil-rights lawyers are on the
job there. After all, we don’t check into a motel on the
assurance that hate crimes perpetrated there will be prosecuted.
We also want the assurance that the establishment will be
reasonably civil, quiet and clean.

It’s time to aim for an American college room uncrazy
enough that an adult, too, might consider moving in.

(Amity Shlaes is a Bloomberg View columnist and the
director of the Four Percent Growth Project at the Bush
Institute. The opinions expressed are her own.)